Busy Monsters Read online

  “Not that many people read my stuff, Groot. What are you getting at, please?”

  “I was just thinking: she might have flown the coop when she realized you were a murderous bastard who knows the ins and outs of immoderate behavior. And pardon me for saying so, buddy, but your bent mind is just like Marvin’s.”

  “She wouldn’t have been flattered, then?”

  “Negative. Women are a breed unto themselves. You know that or else you wouldn’t have bought all the copies at the food store. Now, to my car.”

  “Right. Pull into the garage so the neighbors don’t see us with a rifle and call the very bored police.”

  When Groot’s car was safely inside, I shut the garage door and clicked on the fluorescent row of bulbs above my work area. The sight of the rifle felt like being plugged into the nearest socket: amps or watts or volts hummed through me. Its matte-black prettiness beckoned a man to touch it, and I, in my man-weakness and curiosity, did so. It cradled so naturally and comfortably in my arms I understood immediately why human beings so enjoy firing them at one another.

  “That’s a DSA Gas-Trap Carbine, .223-caliber, a feisty girl, fully auto, though loyal. She can get out of hand at times, but stroke her tender, don’t squeeze her rough, and she’ll spit the way you want her to. The .223-caliber is the way you want to go. All your standard Army-issue M16s are .223, as is the civilian AR-15.”

  “Is this what I need to kill forever a man and thief?”

  “Any old john, or the squid hunter?”

  “Yes, Groot, the squid hunter. Jesus.”

  I was trying to aim through the scope at the basketball on a shelf, left eye squinted, but I couldn’t see anything.

  “At close range or from afar?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Groot. How about from medium range?”

  “Indeed. That will do. She spits fire, so be careful. I’ve got thirty- and forty-round magazines. You’ll need ten of each. When the heat comes you don’t want to stop every five minutes to reload a clip. When we were going door-to-door in Baghdad half of our equipment was loaded clips.”

  I asked about destroying the boat but we forwent the possibility of C4 explosives because Groot said I’d no doubt blow myself jihadist-like to Jupiter. He was all patience and compassion when showing me how to operate the rifle, said I held the weapon lovingly, like a musician with his fiddle, and that this was a pleasing indication. Of what I did not inquire; I just took the compliment. He said the laser sight was idiot-proof: press the trigger halfway and the red dot would find the target. I couldn’t miss. Then he added that my garage required a grease-stained calendar of naked women in possession of tools.

  But: my tentative plan was not to murder Jacob Jacobi, only show him that I was a man aflame. He needed to hear that awful grinding of my inner machinery. And then naturally I’d perforate his vessel so it would plunge to the floor of the harbor, where seaweed and starfish would call it home. Perhaps I’d snip off strands of his enormous mustachio, too. In any case, I wanted to be feared. I wanted to be taken seriously, and few sights in life are more fearsome than a refugee with an automatic weapon. Just click on the television if you want to know how men are supposed to behave in America.

  “Are you sure about this?” Groot asked before leaving.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Every man has a choice.”

  “That’s movie dialogue,” I said. “And not true.”

  “But true enough,” he said. “And it would make a great movie. Just think—”

  “Yes, I have thought of it.”

  “Just scare him, Charlie. Teach him to stay away from another man’s gal. Don’t kill anyone.”

  MY PARENTS’ HOUSE: nearly unchanged from the time of my youth, New England suburban, a Cape with lawns front and back, two-car garage with electric opener. Inside: pointless bric-a-brac aplenty. I had learned to crawl there on that pukey 1970s rug. My first car at seventeen, a white Buick Regal, was allowed to take up one-third of that macadam driveway, beneath the basketball hoop, which for some reason was still there. The neighborhood had a watch program, concerned Christians with one eye on the imminence of felonies, which usually meant any poor black guy who happened to wander down our streets, impressed by the towering trees and Crayola-green front yards. God forbid two black guys happened to wander by: a cop would be there in four minutes flat with menacing stares and maybe a torch. Why had I not made my own home farther than ten minutes from my parents’, Paris or Barcelona, say?

  Sunk in their sofa now, creased down the middle, staring up through the skylight and beguiled by cumulus clouds, I was nothing but jetsam to my Cleopatra. My father and mother sat on the sofa across from me, both of them soaking in what I had just told them, looking over at me with a mishmash of sympathy and disgust—although my father, career curmudgeon since the death of my brother twenty-some years earlier, was more disgust than sympathy.

  Two sixty-year-olds sitting a cushion apart: one who looked twenty years younger in jeans and running shoes and hair that was not a blue Brillo pad, and another who looked twenty years older in checkered pajamas and a bathrobe, grayer than the soot piled in the fireplace, a battalion of pill bottles beside him on the end table. This was what I had to look forward to without Gillian? Married to someone I merely settled for and liked only a little if at all? Ulcerous, every bit of it.

  My mother said, handkerchief by her mouth as if she’d soon be sick, “Where did she go, again, dear?”

  And I told her again: Jacobi, the squid, the letters I had found. I couldn’t lower my head from the skylight or seem to feel my feet. My voice, I heard, was born as a whisper.

  “I’m not surprised,” my father said, a wool blanket across his lap—the very wool blanket Gillian had knitted for him the previous Christmas. “This Jacobi sounds like he has a real job. Doesn’t make up stories for a living.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I’m not making up anything.”

  “Even that name is a lie. Homar. What’s that? The last name I gave you isn’t good enough? You embarrassed by your name?”

  I had to tell him about pen names, etc. The grandfather clock, older and more erect than me, tolled the arrival of five p.m. Whole precincts inside me shuddered.

  My father said, “I’d like to know how you pay your bills. That’s one essay I’d want to read, actually: ‘How I Pay My Bills,’ by Charles Homar. I’d read that one.”

  “Bernie,” my mother told him, “pretend to be understanding.”

  He said, “How does a guy almost burn down his house trying to get rid of a squirrel? Answer me that. You have to be some kind of dummy.”

  If he kept on this way, his breath coming out in lunges, my mother was going to have to retrieve the oxygen tank and slap the mask across his mouth. Yes, this was middle-class melodrama, folks. Just think how much melodrama sounds like melanoma and you’ll begin to get the picture.

  “And who writes about a rectal exam and Socrates?” he asked. “Who would do something like that? Embarrass his old father like that.”

  I nearly asked him to be human, have opposable thumbs. He was looking at me as if he yearned to leap across the carpet and asphyxiate me almost to death. And it occurred to me then, for the first time in my life: You know who my father looked like? Dennis Hopper. In Blue Velvet. Does that explain anything?

  “I sit before you now no better than ejecta,” I said, “a discarded pipsqueak with a whole gaggle of hurt within him.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way,” he said. “Who talks like that? I’m not Groot, degenerate that he is. That doesn’t even mean anything, a whole gaggle of hurt. This is America, Charlie.”

  I said, “Groot fights for our country.”

  “He’s a mercenary. I never liked that boy. The two of you speaking like weirdos all the time. You should both get real jobs.”

  “Bernie,” she implored, “Charles needs our understanding right now.” And then to me, “What about the wedding? I bought my dress.”

>   “Our understanding?” he asked. “He needs a brain in his head is what he needs. Your mother showed me your last little story, about going down to Virginia to murder that trooper. Is this how we raised you? To tell lies and pass them off as truth?”

  I was still too exhausted to sit up straight on the sofa and look my father in his brown marbles. But I could see him leaning forward, getting more excited by the minute, and I thought: If you have a heart attack right now I wouldn’t move half a centimeter to help you.

  “You’re lucky you’re not in jail, pal. And what about the dig you gave me in that piece? You want to explain that to me?”

  I must have had a look on me that pronounced confusion or any one of its synonyms, because he said, “Don’t play dumb, you know goddamn well what dig. You said that Gillian really cares about me and this is a mystery to you because I’m a no-good bastard, or something to that effect.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You very well goddamn did.”

  “Now, that’s a sentence,” I told him. “You very well goddamn did.”

  The day was dying; through the skylight I could see the navy blue going black. My mother had so many color patterns going on—from the shag rugs to the fake art on the walls to the flamingo couches and blue throw pillows—a contract was needed to help coordinate them. But if you had searched with Sherlock Holmes himself you wouldn’t have found a film of dust or cobweb or food smudge anywhere in that house. My mother subscribed to the view that cleanliness is next door to godliness, heaven being a bleached-clean abode.

  He said, “Gillian is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and this horse’s ass had to screw it up. He’s stupid, I think.”

  “Charles isn’t stupid, Bernie. You know, he’s a literary man, like Mark Twain. Please calm down.”

  “Ha, Mark Twain,” he spat at her. “You soil the good man’s honor. There was a man who told the truth and wasn’t ashamed of his name, the great Twain family from Connecticut.”

  “Twain,” I said, “is a pen name, Dad. And he was from Missouri.”

  “Don’t tell me where he was from. I went to his house in Hartford, moron. What, you ashamed of your home state now, too? Connecticut not good enough for you?”

  Listening to him speak was like watching a leper scratch his scabs.

  “If he writes like Twain, then I golf like Jack Nicklaus.”

  And my mother said, “You don’t golf at all anymore, Bernie.”

  Golf: there you have it—officially suburban.

  We three endured several minutes of pathetic silence as my mother dabbed her eye corners and my father attempted to bridle his breathing. And I remembered something, sitting there: a tableau from my childhood when I wasn’t more than waist-high, maybe five or six years old, my brother Bart still in diapers and goo-gooing around the house. My mother dropped me at the elementary school one roasting summer morn to attend a puppet show. She left me there to wait in line outside in a summer heat trying to make wax from asphalt. When I realized I was alone, a whippersnapper without guide or guardian, the fear in me a barbed thing, I began crying as any dumped-off child would.

  An Indian man—Indian as in Pakistan, not Pocahontas—and his boy my age tried to soothe me and then offered to drive me home, if I could remember how to get there. Although I wasn’t tall enough to see over the dashboard of his beige car—an Oldsmobile, I’m half sure—I somehow navigated him to our house ten blocks away. They stayed put behind the wheel; I bounded out, and when I did, I saw my mother at the front storm door, Windexing the glass, wearing a blue bandanna to rope back her pile of vanilla mane. She cracked opened the door and jabbed out her arm to wave, either to me or to the Indian savior behind me, a wave of either hello or goodbye, it wasn’t clear. And all those years later, sunk in my parents’ sofa, I still didn’t know.

  “Okay, Charlie,” my father said finally. “Look—your mother and I want to help you. We’ll get Gillian back. Who else talks to me once a week, brings me things, shows interest? Who else cares?”

  My mother ignored that. “Charlie,” she said, “we should consult Father Henry. He always gave advice to you when you were a kid.”

  What an unorthodox definition of advice she had. I said, “When I saw Father Henry a few weeks ago he knew about the wedding but didn’t seem to know Gillian is Jewish.”

  “Yes, we read that in the magazine, dear.”

  My father said, “Gillian’s a Druid?”

  “Jewish,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Gillian,” I said, “is a Jew. Please tell me you knew that. If you’d read my memoirs you would know it.”

  “I don’t read that trash. Your mother reads it. I only skim it looking for foul references to me.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Gillian’s a Jew? Since when?”

  “Oh, Christ, I’m leaving,” and I tried to find the muscle to move.

  “No, stay, Charlie,” my mother said. “You hungry?”

  “It’s fine,” he said, “it’s fine. I just didn’t know…I mean she doesn’t seem…And I don’t know how you could expect people to believe that a priest gave you his blessing to kill someone. That’s what I mean—it’s all lies.”

  Several more minutes of silence ensued and when I began sobbing—a meager sob that nevertheless owned the potential to shift into a howl—my father said, “Oh, Lord,” and my mother rose to pass me her handkerchief. And they just let me sob—I no more than an aquarium exhibit whose glass they saw the pointlessness of tapping on.

  Now that night had fully come, the neighbors behind us began turning on lights, and over my father’s shoulder I could see the illuminated upstairs window of what was once Emma Bishop’s bedroom, exactly even with my own from across the modest width of two backyards. Several years older than me and boilerplate-beautiful, blond Emma was the reason I asked for binoculars for my fourteenth birthday, to watch her promenade back and forth unclothed on the telephone, she unaware of Newton’s light laws that said I in the dark could see her but she in her lit-up bedroom could not see me seeing her. She never shut her shades.

  This was the year Bartholomew’s leukemia grew fangs and bit hard, bruises on him like stigmata, his decade-old body a dartboard for doctors with no hope but plenty of pins. You’ve seen the after-school specials about saintly sick kids, terminal and uncomplaining, who enjoy affirmations about how fortunate they are, about God’s great plan, etc. That wasn’t Bart. Angry overmuch, he had the bitterness of an Apache circa 1875, and who could blame him? On an arctic December night before bed, as I watched Emma Bishop model her nipples for my binoculars, I heard Bart’s faint cough behind me in the dark, and when I turned, I saw his sallow, vaporous self standing in a boulevard of moonlight just inside my bedroom.

  I said his name, and although I couldn’t see tears, I knew he was crying, and not because his brother was a voyeuristic pervert all packed for hell, but because he could see Emma too, and his ten-year-old heart and brain—already howitzered by what life is—must have suspected that her radiant nakedness was the very incarnation of a man’s happiness, a happiness he would never have the chance to hold. Three weeks later he was dead, just in time for Christmas.

  When I left my parents’ house that evening, my father tried to slip me fifty bucks, as if that would lighten the half ton on my heart.

  NOW: I HAD the name of the port in southern Maine from one of Jacobi’s emails to Gillian, and after a dozen phone calls and some clicking on the Net, I also had detailed directions: a two-hour ride. Groot said he would join me but his mother had given him firm orders to retrieve an ice-cream cake for his father’s birthday bash. I understood, and with his blessing over the phone I set off, the loyal rifle and clips under a blanket on my backseat. Geronimo.

  I was fully aware that history was repeating itself, sort of, life being marked by panic and patterns: another car ride to kill in the name of Gillian, Interstate 95, north this time. Think about the dejection I fel
t driving to this harbor in Maine: it was a whack to the temple and then the aorta. Still, I was almost certain I would not be able to massacre Jacobi and his underlings. I’d probably just discharge some rounds into the air, cause a disturbance, scatter robins. And then—what? I didn’t know; my ribs were closing quick around the anguished drum my heart had become. Opposites and contraries were hard at work: the hours hopped side to side on one leg; my wrinkled brain numbed and sharpened; always was fast becoming never. And there was the persistent question, the tiny word I saw all along the highway in New Hampshire, on green road signs, personalized license plates—one read FO SHO, the ghetto equivalent of FOR SURE (I checked)—and along the trailers of eighteen-wheelers hell-bent on destination and pollution: Why? Why had she done this?

  Several times I had to stop driving, park at darkened rest stops with overfull trash cans, because I was being barraged by what felt like the menopausal hot flashes of a disappointed woman. Gillian was quite possibly, just then, sharing with Jacob Jacobi the riches I thought belonged to me alone. Imagine if your child were to call another man Father, another gal Mom; what descends upon you is not just betrayal and hurt, but a disorientation most impure. I was not fit for the highway. The car horns of oil-gurgling SUVs and tiny hybrids alike were blasting at me left, right, and rear. I yelled through my window, “I’m armed. I’ll shoot your Honda full of holes and write a haiku about it.”

  As it always does when I flail about blind, poetry spoke to me. Gillian had collected every piece of literature that made mention of the giant squid, and in an effort to impress her with my interest, to mesh or meld, I took it upon myself to read these verses and stories, committing many of them to memory. Mr. Tennyson devoted a poem to the beast, and when he wrote the first few lines, he had my sorry state in mind:

  Below the thunders of the upper deep,

  Far, far beneath the abysmal sea,

  His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

  The Kraken sleepeth.

  As you can see, that was me: thunders, abysmal, ancient, and dreamless, as in the destruction of my dreams. The creature and I were kin; we were hunted by Jacobi the Slayer. Some prayers to Poseidon were in order; I needed, people, all the help I could get.